Integrating across memory episodes: Developmental trends

Abstract

Memory enables us to use information from our past experiences to guide new behaviours, calling for the need to integrate or form inference across multiple distinct episodic experiences. Here, we compared children (aged 9–10 years), adolescents (aged 12–13 years), and young adults (aged 19–25 years) on their ability to form integration across overlapping associations in memory. Participants first encoded a set of overlapping, direct AB- and BC-associations (object-face and face-object pairs) as well as non-overlapping, unique DE-associations. They were then tested on these associations and inferential AC-associations. The experiment consisted of four such encoding/retrieval cycles, each consisting of different stimuli set. For accuracy on both unique and inferential associations, young adults were found to outperform teenagers, who in turn outperformed children. However, children were particularly slower than teenagers and young adults in making judgements during inferential than during unique associations. This suggests that children may rely more on making inferences during retrieval, by first retrieving the direct associations, followed by making the inferential judgement. Furthermore, young adults showed a higher correlation between accuracy in direct (AB, BC) and inferential AC-associations than children. This suggests that, young adults relied closely on AB- and BC-associations for making AC decisions, potentially by forming integrated ABC-triplets during encoding or retrieval. Taken together, our findings suggest that there may be an age-related shift in how information is integrated across experienced episodes, namely from relying on making inferences at retrieval during middle childhood to forming integrated representations at different memory processing stages in adulthood.

Integration of memory content in adults and children: Developmental differences in task conditions and functional consequences.

“…Memory integration has been examined in nonhuman animals (e.g., Bunsey & Eichenbaum, 1996; DeVito, Lykken, Kanter, & Eichenbaum, 2010) and in both human adults and developing children (e.g., Bauer & San Souci, 2010; Preston, Shrager, Dudukovic, & Gabrieli, 2004; respectively). It has been approached using behavioral assays (e.g., Bauer & Larkina, 2017; Shing et al, 2019; Varga & Bauer, 2017b), neuroimaging techniques (e.g., Sweegers, Takashima, Fernández, & Talamini, 2014; Varga & Bauer, 2017a; Zeithamova & Preston, 2010), as well as computational modeling (e.g., McClelland, McNaughton, & O’Reilly, 1995; Norman & O’Reilly, 2003). The process of memory integration has garnered such intense attention because understanding how it works provides key insights into how memory networks are organized and reorganized with experience.…”

Memories of structured input become increasingly distorted across development - Working Paper

“…This type of representation (Brunec et al, 2018; may be supported by the late-developing (Calabro et al, 2020;Demaster et al, 2016;Gogtay et al, 2004;Langnes et al, 2020) anterior hippocampus via its connections with medial prefrontal cortex . Consistent with these past neural observations, behavioral evidence also suggests that children do not spontaneously store complex, higher-order relations that unfold across multiple experiences in memory until at least early adolescence (Bauer et al, 2012(Bauer et al, , 2020Schlichting et al, 2021;Shing et al, 2019). On the whole, existing research would therefore suggest later development of memory for meaningful groupings relative to specific associations.…”

“…Despite their apparent contradiction with some findings, our results of an increasing tendency to extract higher-order associative structure with development are consistent with numerous other studies on memory integration. Such studies have shown developmental increases in the tendency to combine across multiple memories to generate new inferences, both when self-deriving new semantic knowledge (Bauer et al, 2012(Bauer et al, , 2020, as well as inferring novel associations between items indirectly related through a common link (Schlichting et al, 2016(Schlichting et al, , 2021Shing et al, 2019). Relevant to the present work, older more than younger learners attribute shared features to items originally experienced close in time in an exposure sequence (i.e., a member of the same "temporal community"; Pudhiyidath et al, 2020), consistent with our finding that adults and older but not younger children may link together group members in memory.…”

Musical expertise shapes visual-melodic memory integration

“…We used a musical adaption of a visual associative inference task that has previously been used to study memory integration in behavioral and fMRI studies 21,22,[25][26][27]. In the musical variant, participants learned overlapping pairs of objects and melodies (object-melody and melody-object pairs; i.e.…”

“…We compared professional musicians and non-musicians by using a visual-melodic variant of an associative inference task 21,22 , a paradigm that is frequently used to study memory integration. Participants were required to memorize overlapping melody-object pairs and to form an integrated memory of these associations.…”